The long-term goal of AT&T is to become the third dominant walled garden in what Madison Avenue not-so-affectionately refers to as "the duopoly:" Google and Facebook. Get ready to hear a lot about the "triopoly."

One of the unintended consequences of marketer efforts to comply with the EU's new consumer data privacy rules has been a push by some to gather even more potentially sensitive data from consumers than they had in the first place. I've been hearing this anecdotally for weeks now, but it was a conversation I had late last week with the founder one of many entrepreneurs rushing to help consumers and brands mediate the exchange of personal data and privacy compliance that I realized what a paradox GDPR has become.

New variants of malware scams emerge almost daily, but one detected late last week deserves special attention from digital advertisers and media buyers considering cryptocurrency models. Instead of infecting computers to create fraudulent bot traffic, the new variant -- dubbed Prowli -- infects computers to siphon processing power to mine cryptocurrency.

The backlash to Accenture's announcement that it's getting into the programmatic media-buying business surprised me. Not because Accenture is diversifying, but because some pundits see a problem with that. The chief argument seems to be the most classic one: that you don't want a fox counting the chickens in the henhouse. Or, as MediaCom Worldwide Chairman-CEO Stephen Allan posited in a post on LinkedIn: "They can't police transparency and measure performance for clients while also competing with those of us who provide media services."